Abstract：This study deals with management accounting practices in small and medium sized service firms in Finland. The recent trends of Management Accounting Systems (MAS), such as Activity Based Costing (ABC), are not frequently used in Finnish service organizations, although these practices have beenrealized by the majority of respondents to be an important tool to understand real product costs, decrease production costs, modernize cost accounting systems and identify activity costs. An empirical study indicates that a few Finnish small and medium sized service organizations have implemented recent developments of MAS such as ABC. The practices of MAS do not vary with differences in type of service firms that were included in this study. This paper demonstrates that MAS are not very successful in the Finnish service organizations investigated to achieve the goal of decision making, planning and management control, and to improve the information system within the organizations. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Accounting is a universal language of business and provides a great deal of necessary and useful information; but, as a tool to meet the demands of time, accounting systems have serious shortcomings such as invalidity, incompleteness, infrequency, inaccuracy, According to Horngren and Foster (1991), financial information is inadequate for decision making purposes. Kaydos (1991) argues that it is more than a question of semantics; by no stretch of the imagination can currentaccounting systems provide managers with all theinformation they need to make timely and effective decisions. 本文来自辣.文~论^文·网原文请找腾讯3249.114
With the rapid changes in manufacturing technologies as well as vigorous global competition and enormously expanding information processing capabilities, traditional Management Accounting Systems (MAS) are not providing useful information to assist management in fulfilling organizational objectives and decision making, planning, and control (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987). New technology evidently leads to a change in cost structures and hence increasing levels of complexity, competitiveness and environ- mental and technological changes (Bihimani and Brimson, 1989; Kerremans et al., 1991). By increasing the level of awareness of new technological development and competitiveness, the appropriateness of existing systems is questionable as regards the relevance of new tools for doing things better in service as well as in manufacturing organizations. In addition,the structures of financial service industries are changing rapidly and hence it is important to determine the cost and revenue efficiency of the evolving financial institutions. If these institutions are becoming more efficient, then improved profitability, greater amounts of funds available, better prices and service quality for customers and greater safety and reliability can be expected. That is, differences in managerial ability to control costs or maximize revenues appear to be greater than the cost effects of the choice of scale and scope of production (Berger et al., 1993).Shank and Govindarajan (1993) argue that modern management accounting systems should reflect the critical success of the firms.2450